Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

Why in America have we hung on to the magical beliefs as well as the industriousness and money love and individualism that our founding religion encouraged?*9 Some of the standard scholarly explanations seem correct as far as they go, but they’re all limited by the scope and tools of their particular disciplines. They also tend to construct explanations that flatter Americans. Legalists focus on the Constitution and especially the First Amendment—that government wasn’t permitted to mess around in religion, which made religion flourish and attracted persecuted believers from elsewhere. Other historians attribute it to our frontier past, where wilderness folk, untethered from social control, were more inclined and free to dream up new religions: they could, so they did. But none that I’ve seen convincingly explains the persistence or extravagance of supernatural belief, or why during the last century and particularly the last half-century our divergence from the norm has grown so extreme. They don’t look at our religions and spirituality in the context of the larger American predisposition to feel special and think magically. They don’t register the connections between our religion and the rest of our giddy, uncertain grip on reality, the free-range wishfulness, the great American all of it.